"Four-twelve."
"I'm going to hear him on the radio. Starting Monday. I'm going to hear his voice."
"I know."
"Are you going to file it?"
Alton looked out through the windshield at the dark street, at the porch light, at the wooden ramp.
"I keep thinking about your job," he said. "You start Monday. Those are the people you'll be talking to all night. I don't want you to be the call-taker whose daddy filed on one of them."
Quincy was quiet for a long time.
"Dad," he said. "If I'm going to sit in that room for twelve hours and send that man to people's houses, I'd like it on paper what he does when he gets there." He turned his head toward his father. "That's what you told me. You get home. Then you decide."
On Monday morning Thuy Phan drove to the Henley County tag office with the MV-1 and the title and the TAVT check and Dr. Anand's letter for the disability plate, and then she drove to Macon and sat in Mr. Fairbanks's office while he read Sergeant Benitez's memo twice. He said, in his exact way, that she had done something very foolish, that it might be the most useful foolish thing a client of his had done in years, and that a dated, signed memo from a Bledsoe Mill sergeant calling the April bulletin stale would be Exhibit 14 on the twentieth. Then he said that if she ever ran at a police officer again he would withdraw as her counsel. She said she understood. Neither of them was sure she meant it.
What happened to Officer Brannan, Alton did not know, and did not ask. On Monday morning, on the roof on Pecan Hollow, he heard from Ramiro, who had it from a cousin in the city clerk's office, that Brannan had been taken off the tag detail and put back on regular patrol, days, and that nobody knew if that was punishment or mercy. He heard nothing else.